To End All Wars

by Adam Hochschild

  Throughout Europe the summer weather had been unusually warm, enticing people into the streets. As the evening of August 4 ticked by with no German reply to the British ultimatum, thousands gathered in front of Buckingham Palace and in Parliament Square, less exuberant than the crowds in Berlin, perhaps, but equally loyal to their country, and equally eager to cheer the newly mobilized soldiers in uniform marching through the streets. As Big Ben tolled 11 P.M.—midnight in Berlin—and Britain declared war, thousands of voices began to sing "God Save the King."

  Observing formalities to the last, the Kaiser sent a message to his first cousin King George V, resigning his honorary posts as field marshal in the British army and admiral of the fleet in the Royal Navy. In Parliament, meanwhile, with astounding swiftness—helped by the fact that victimized Belgium, like Ireland, was heavily Catholic—the Irish crisis evaporated. All sides agreed to put home rule on hold.

  Throughout Europe, men were fearful not of being killed, but of not getting a chance to fight before the war was over. "A single worry tormented me at that time, as with so many others, would we not reach the Front too late?" wrote a young German corporal, Adolf Hitler. The British novelist Alec Waugh recalled how he and his friends "joined with our elders in the discussions about peace, but we kept to ourselves the consideration that weighed most with us. We did not want the war to end before we had reached the trenches; we dreaded having to sit silent after the war when men only a few months older than ourselves compared front-line experiences."

  The day after its declaration of war, Britain, too, declared that the very fundaments of civilization were at stake. The country was fighting, Asquith told the House of Commons, "not for aggression or the advancement of its own interests, but for principles whose maintenance is vital to the civilised world." Unfortunately for him, however, the two sides in this war, as in most, did not conveniently break down into the forces of enlightenment and darkness. One of Britain's allies, after all, was Russia. "Semi-barbarians," Emily Hobhouse called the Russians, in a letter to a Boer friend, when the war began. "Pretty bedfellows indeed!" Nor would Germany's invasion of Belgium be the only case of a great power assuming the right to march across the territory of a neutral one: within weeks, British troops would cross Chinese soil to attack the German colony of Tsingtao.

  With reservists summoned to active duty by telegrams, church bells, and even bugle calls, some six million soldiers were flowing in trains, wagons, on horseback, and on foot across Europe and the British Isles toward various battlefronts. It was the largest mass movement of men and arms ever seen. Between countries in the world's industrial heartland, limited war was no longer possible. Total war, of a sort not seen before, was about to begin.

  Two days after Britain entered the fray, a despairing Hardie took a train to Wales, to appear at a long-planned public meeting in his parliamentary constituency in the coal-mining town of Merthyr Tydfil. Having been a strong supporter of a local miners' strike some years before, he was a popular figure in the district. Here, in the bedrock of British labor militance, he believed public opinion would be with him. But the miners' union official who was to chair the meeting took Hardie aside, and—he would later write—never forgot the "look of surprise and astonishment ... on his face when I told him that the feeling was intensely in favour of war." When someone taunted Hardie about why his sons had not enlisted, he replied, "I would rather see my two boys put up against a wall and shot than see them go to the War." In response came hoots and jeers.

  The meeting dissolved in pandemonium, with Hardie and his supporters drowned out by a much larger group who sang the national anthem and "Rule Britannia." When he left the hall, jostled by an angry crowd, shots were fired, apparently into the air. "We walked up the street followed by a howling mob," a colleague remembered. "He looked neither left nor right, his head erect, grey haired, grey bearded chieftain, one of the grandest men that had ever braved the rabble." He spent the night in the house of the local schoolmaster, surrounded by a mob shouting, "Turn the German out!"

  Compounding Hardie's grief was a more personal sorrow, for at some unknown point not long before the war that engulfed Europe, his love affair with Sylvia Pankhurst had quietly come to an end. We can only guess at the reasons. Some difficulties were there from the beginning: the great difference in their ages, their all-consuming work. In the previous few years, she had come into her own on the national political stage and perhaps no longer felt the same need for the affirmation Hardie's attention had given her, or perhaps Hardie was put off by her streak of martyrdom. Or perhaps she simply grasped that Hardie was never going to leave his wife. In any case, the love letters and poems ceased. Although the two remained friends, and on one or two occasions spoke from the same platform, Hardie now faced the most painful moment of his political life alone.

  Although some generals knew enough to fear otherwise, most people were confident the war would be short. The explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, about to set out from England to attempt the first full crossing of the Antarctic continent, patriotically telegraphed the Admiralty offering to cancel his plans and put his ship and crew at its service. Within an hour he received a one-word telegram: "Proceed." The very day that Britain joined the war, the King sent for Shackleton and handed him a Union Jack to carry on the expedition. By the time Shackleton got to Antarctica, crossed it, and returned, all expected, the war would be long past and the country ready to celebrate the British flag's being raised over yet more new places on the globe.

  Two who cared about keeping that flag flying, Alfred Milner and Rudyard Kipling, welcomed their country's taking part in the great fight. Both had been restlessly anticipating this moment for years. Even before Britain declared war, Milner had been pressing friends in the government to send troops to France. When the declaration finally came he said, "It is better to have an end of the uncertainty." Kipling claimed to have only two frustrations now: that he was too old to fight, and that John, just turning 17, was too nearsighted. But perhaps if the war lasted long enough that barrier could be overcome.

  An everyone-at-your-posts order meant that Violet Cecil's husband, Edward, back in England on leave, was promptly recalled to Egypt, which would leave her free to spend more time with Milner. But her 18-year-old George, unlike John Kipling, was heading for the front, his battalion of the Grenadier Guards among the first British units ordered to France. Violet and her daughter Helen handed baskets of fruit through a window as the troop train began to move; soldiers cheered; a band played "Auld Lang Syne"; and his mother had one last glimpse of George's "flushed, excited face thrust out of the window." For the first time ever in Helen's sight, Violet burst into tears.

  Milner soon went to stay with her at Great Wigsell; the army had requisitioned his own country house as an officers' barracks. (Enlisted men slept in rows of tents in his fields.) We do not know what he said to her, but he may well have reassured her that at least George was in the best of hands, of officers who had proven their mettle in the Boer War, where he had known them. For in charge of the corps of two army divisions of which George's battalion would be a part was Sir Douglas Haig. And commanding the entire 75,000-man British Expeditionary Force being rushed across the English Channel was Sir John French.

  8. AS SWIMMERS INTO CLEANNESS LEAPING

  THE NEWS THAT armies were on the march spread instantly throughout the continent, from Trafalgar Square to Nevsky Prospekt. At Saint-Malo on the coast of France, a picturesque walled city in Brittany, townspeople and summer vacationers gathered somberly to hear the mayor read Germany's declaration of war. Among the crowd was a fugitive from British justice.

  In the preceding months, Emmeline Pankhurst had tangled with the authorities more furiously than ever, and they had begun using a new legal tool against her. To deprive suffragettes on hunger strikes of their martyrdom, the government was applying a law called the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, which everyone immediately rechristened the Cat and Mouse Act. Any hunger-
striking suffragette would be released when she became weak, allowed to re-cover, and then rearrested as many times as necessary for her to serve her sentence.

  A court had sent Pankhurst to prison the previous year because one night several suffragettes had slipped into a country house being built for Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George and planted a bomb, whose blast destroyed five rooms. Pankhurst had not known about the bombing beforehand but promptly gave it her enthusiastic blessing. As a result, she was found guilty of "wickedly and maliciously" inciting "persons unknown" and given three years' penal servitude.

  Declaring herself to be "a prisoner of war," she repeatedly went on hunger strikes, and the government repeatedly released and rearrested her. During her most recent imprisonment she had reached a new peak of defiant fury, and was put into solitary confinement for a week, accused of insubordination, using offensive language, and striking a prison officer. Released, she was ordered to return to prison once again on July 22, 1914. Instead, pale and emaciated, she had fled across the Channel to recuperate in the company of the exiled Christabel. British officials must have expected both mother and daughter to be ardent opponents of the war; indeed, on its very eve, as ultimatums filled the air of Europe, Christabel was quick to declare that war would be "God's vengeance upon the people who held women in subjection."

  But as soon as actual fighting began, everything changed: Emmeline ordered all Women's Social and Political Union activity to halt. The British government, meanwhile, unconditionally freed all imprisoned suffragettes. (The amnesty was greeted with relief at Scotland Yard's Special Branch, where it released many of Basil Thomson's agents for new duties, including the 12 who earned a bonus of three shillings a week for knowing shorthand. They had often been kept busy recording suffragette rallies.) Although the next issue of the WSPU's fiery newspaper, the Suffragette, had already been printed, Emmeline and Christabel canceled its distribution and embarked for home. As the ferry took them across the Channel to England, tens of thousands of John French's soldiers were on troop transports steaming in the other direction. Emmeline was heading toward a battle of her own—with her daughter Sylvia.

  Just before the war began, Emmeline and Christabel had pushed Sylvia out of the WSPU. But the rift was about to deepen. True to her socialist convictions, Sylvia passionately opposed British participation in the war. A public clash with her mother and sister seemed inevitable.

  Voices like Sylvia's were few. Even Charlotte Despard, who had spoken against "this criminal war" to a rally of more than 2,000 women on the night Britain declared hostilities, fell uncharacteristically silent; it was hard to oppose the war when her beloved younger brother was now commander in chief at the front. Keir Hardie, who continued to call the war a catastrophe, found himself jeered on the street in London. A fellow MP came upon him sitting on the terrace of the House of Commons, gazing despairingly at the Thames. Although he roamed the country speaking his mind, one comrade described him as "crumpled in body and broken in spirit." In the euphoria of mobilization, press coverage of his speeches was scanty, and few people seemed to notice when his Independent Labour Party issued a defiant proclamation: "Across the roar of guns, we send sympathy and greeting to the German Socialists.... They are no enemies of ours, but faithful friends."

  Hardie faced a dilemma common to peace activists then and now: how do you oppose a war without seeming to undermine the husbands, fathers, and brothers of your fellow citizens whose lives are in danger? Occasionally he equivocated, at one point speaking of pushing German troops back across their borders. His heart went out to the families who soon started receiving tragic news from France, sometimes those who were his political enemies. After the only son of a wealthy, stridently chauvinist Conservative MP was killed at the front, Hardie wrote to a friend that he wanted "to go up to him and put my arms around his neck."

  For a country that, until almost the last minute, had looked as if it might not join the conflict, the transformation was stunning. Military recruiters were warmly welcomed everywhere, as streets were cordoned off so that men waiting to enlist could practice bayoneting dummies. Newly enlisted soldiers marched off to railway stations singing. On August 1 only eight men had signed up at the army's principal recruiting office in London. Three days later, the crowd trying to get in was so large that 20 policemen were needed to force a path for the officer on duty to reach his post. Three days after that, to accommodate all applicants, the Edinburgh recruiting office had to remain open all night.

  In London alone, 100 new recruits were sworn in every hour. Some two dozen plays on patriotic themes, with titles like Call to Arms, were rushed into West End theaters, and during intermissions recruiters signed up men from the audience. At Knavesmire, Yorkshire, delighted spectators filled the stands at a racecourse to watch squadrons of the Royal Scots Greys practice the cavalry charges they planned to use against German troops in France. Everywhere, recruiters found that one thing above all was certain to draw a torrent of eager men: music from a military band. Some units were so flooded with would-be recruits that they began charging an entrance fee; others had to drill with umbrellas or broomsticks for lack of rifles. Tens of thousands of men were turned away on grounds of age or health, among them the imperial-minded novelist John Buchan, who was deeply disappointed. Within a year or two, the need for soldiers would be so great that those barriers would diminish, but at the beginning men felt them keenly: when Edgar Francis Robinson, a 33-year-old London lawyer, was turned down by the army for health reasons, he shot himself.

  Similar fervor was to be found around the world. In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, among the white population of South Africa and British settlers in colonies throughout the empire, men rushed to sign up, and battalions of those who were already trained began boarding ships for Europe, to support the mother country in its hour of need.

  In Britain itself, labor unrest came to an almost complete halt; plans for a general strike in November were shelved; union leaders spoke at recruiting rallies and so many members of the coal miners' union joined up that the government, worrying about coal supplies for the navy, forbade more from enlisting. Emrys Hughes, a 20-year-old college student who would later marry Keir Hardie's daughter, was appalled to find a group of soldiers recruiting in his mining town in the Welsh hills. "I thought that in the Westphalian villages [of Germany] the same appeal was being made, and that the miners there would leave their homes among the hillsides ... to fight ... in exactly the same spirit."

  The national mood was summed up by the 27-year-old poet Rupert Brooke, newly commissioned in the Royal Navy:

  Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

  And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

  With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

  To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

  Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary...

  Brooke would die early the next year, on board a hospital ship.

  His feeling of joy and gratitude that war had come at last was echoed in Germany. The war meant "purification, liberation," said Thomas Mann, from the "toxic comfort of peace."

  Gray-uniformed German troops now headed for Belgium in 550 trains a day, some with "To Paris" chalked on their sides and bedecked with flowers by enthusiastic crowds. "You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees," the Kaiser told his soldiers. The far smaller Belgian army, however, put up an unexpectedly stiff fight. Just as horse-mad as the British, the Germans had included in their invasion force eight cavalry divisions—each with more than 5,000 horses—the largest body of horsemen ever sent into war in Western Europe. But they quickly discovered that the lances and sabers of their famed Uhlans were useless against massed quick-firing Belgian rifles. Hundreds of Uhlans were shot out of their saddles. A ring of Belgian forts surrounding Liège, near the German border, further delayed the invasion until they were finally pounded into submission by giant siege guns, each so large it
required 36 horses to pull. Explosions from their shells flung earth and masonry 1,000 feet into the air.

  Exasperated by the resistance, the Germans soon imposed a regime of terror, in town after occupied town setting houses aflame, some with families inside. They shot Belgian hostages by the thousands on the pretext—for which there was no clear evidence—that civilians were sniping at German troops. By late August, German forces had taken the capital, Brussels, pushed the remnants of the Belgian army out of the way, and were moving, if considerably behind schedule, into northern France. Still anticipating quick victory, Kaiser Wilhelm II proposed to his generals that, after the war, Germany should permanently take over border areas of France and Belgium, clear them of inhabitants, and settle them with German soldiers and their families.

  The French army proved incapable of containing the Germans flooding across the Belgian frontier, and to the southeast, an offensive of their own, where France directly bordered Germany, was disastrous. French prewar planning had centered on the mystique of the attack: great masses of men filled with élan rushing forward in shoulder-to-shoulder bayonet charges or thunderous cavalry assaults that would strike fear into German hearts. Furthermore, France's troops went into battle in the highly visible blue coats and bright red trousers that had long made them the most flamboyantly dressed of Europe's foot soldiers. At a parliamentary hearing two years earlier, the minister of war had shouted down a reformer who wanted to eliminate the red trousers. "Never!" he declared. "Le pantalon rouge c'est la France!" Cuirassier cavalrymen in tall brass helmets with horsehair plumes made conspicuous targets in a different way: they were, commented a British officer wryly, "easy to see at long distances, as the sun flashed in all directions from their shining breastplates. As the latter were not bullet-proof, it was difficult to understand their exact function." Zouave troops from France's North African colonies were easy to spot in red caps and baggy trousers of brilliant white. The French officers commanding Algerian cavalry were singled out by their bright red tunics. And in case sight was not enough to guide enemy marksmen, there was sound as well: brass bands led many French infantry units on the attack (a practice also sometimes followed by the Germans). Massive French bayonet charges stalled in the face of German machine-gun and point-blank artillery fire that left shattered body parts, still clad in red, blue, and white, littering the battlefield. In less than a month, nearly 300,000 of those well-dressed soldiers would be dead or wounded. No indication whatsoever of this toll appeared in the British press.